Crop Circles

Crop circles, or crop formations, are large patterns made by flattening standing crops — wheat, barley, rapeseed, and others — into geometric or figurative designs. The modern phenomenon appeared in southern England in the late 1970s and concentrated in Wiltshire, around the prehistoric monuments of Avebury, Stonehenge, and Silbury Hill. On 9 September 1991 Doug Bower and Dave Chorley confessed in the Today newspaper that they had made the early formations by hand from 1978 onward, using ropes, planks, and sighting caps, and the organized art of circle-making has been openly documented ever since. Mainstream investigation treats crop circles as human-made — hoaxes and, increasingly, a recognized form of land art — and that view is well established. The Wheel of Heaven framework accepts it: most formations are demonstrably made by people, a handful of contested physical anomalies remain unresolved, and the alleged extraterrestrial 'messages' at Chilbolton and Crabwood are unverified. The canon's one direct point of contact is a single case — a formation the Message from the Designers foreword says resembled the Raëlian embassy model — read as meaningful without treating crop circles as a channel of alliance communication.

Crop circles, or crop formations, are large patterns made by flattening standing crops — most often wheat, barley, rapeseed, rye, maize, linseed, or soy — into geometric, mathematical, or figurative designs. The modern phenomenon appeared in southern England in the late 1970s and concentrated heavily in Wiltshire, in the belt of chalk downland around the prehistoric monuments of Avebury, Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, and Alton Barnes. Formations were later reported across Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan.

The turning point came on 9 September 1991, when two Englishmen, Doug Bower (1924–2020) and Dave Chorley (1922–1996), confessed in the Today newspaper that they had made the early formations by hand from 1978 onward. [1] They demonstrated their method — a plank swung on a rope to press the crop flat, with alignment sighted through a hole in a baseball cap — and built a formation for journalists in about 45 minutes; a crop-circle researcher who examined it, not knowing its origin, pronounced it genuine.[a]

The mainstream position has been clear ever since, and it is well established: crop circles are human-made. Most are the work of a small community of artists who treat the field as a canvas, and the practice is now openly documented as a form of land art. The Wheel of Heaven framework accepts that position and holds it steadily. The overwhelming majority of formations are demonstrably made by people; a small number of reported physical anomalies remain unresolved but unproven; the alleged extraterrestrial "messages" in a few celebrated formations are unverified; and the canon's own point of contact with the subject is a single case, read with care rather than enthusiasm.

History and the hoax evidence

Rings of flattened crop had been noticed in English fields for years before anyone thought them remarkable. The modern phenomenon takes its shape from the late 1970s, when formations began appearing around Cheesefoot Head in Hampshire and, soon after, across the downland of Wiltshire. Reports climbed through the 1980s — from a handful a year at the start of the decade to several hundred by its end — and the designs grew with them, from plain circles to elaborate pictograms with rings, spurs, and satellite features. The first book-length treatment, Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews's Circular Evidence (1989), [2] took the rising tally as an open mystery. A subculture grew up around it — the "cerealogists," after Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain — complete with field researchers, newsletters, dowsers, and the physicist Terence Meaden's meteorological hypothesis (below). A notably complex pictogram near Barbury Castle in July 1991, a triangle set with rings, marked the high point of that pre-confession phase.

The framing collapsed weeks later. Bower and Chorley told the Today newspaper that the whole wave had begun with them: two friends who, over pints in the mid-1970s, decided to fake a flying-saucer landing near Cheesefoot Head and kept going for fifteen years, making perhaps two hundred formations. Their tools were plain — a four-foot plank, a loop of rope, and a cap with a sighting wire — and their demonstration was decisive, since the circle they built for the press was authenticated as genuine by a leading researcher before the trick was revealed.[a]

The confession did not end circle-making; it professionalized it. Through the 1990s an organized art scene came into the open, led by Circlemakers — John Lundberg, Rod Dickinson, Wil Russell, and Rob Irving — who had emerged from an earlier collective provocatively named Team Satan (a self-chosen joke, unrelated to the canon's Satan). Circlemakers set out their craft in Rob Irving and John Lundberg's The Field Guide: The Art, History and Philosophy of Crop Circle Making (2006), [3] made commissioned formations for advertisers (Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Pepsi, Nike, Greenpeace, the BBC) and for films including M. Night Shyamalan's Signs (2002), and demonstrated their methods for journalists and documentary crews. The formations grew accordingly: the 151-circle Julia Set that appeared beside Stonehenge in July 1996, its rapid midday appearance the subject of a lasting timing dispute; the 409-circle Milk Hill spiral of August 2001, some 240 metres across and the largest ever recorded; and later three-dimensional and mathematically encoded designs. [4] That trajectory — rising complexity tracked step for step by a documented and improving craft — is the core of the hoax evidence. The thing that was once supposed to be beyond human skill turned out to be exactly what human artists were making.

The geography reinforces the point. The concentration in Wiltshire coincides with one of Europe's densest prehistoric ritual landscapes — Stonehenge, the Avebury henge, Silbury Hill, the West Kennet Long Barrow [5] [6] — and with a long-standing alternative-spiritual community drawn to it. On the mainstream reading, the formations cluster there because the circle-makers do, their choice of setting itself shaped by the landscape's cultural pull rather than by anything in the soil.

The anomalist and framework reading

A minority of researchers hold that human construction, real and dominant though it is, does not account for everything. The most serious of these is the residual-anomaly program: the BLT Research Team (founded in 1989 by John Burke, William Levengood, and Nancy Talbott) and the Dutch physicist Eltjo Haselhoff, who argue that crops in some formations show physical changes hard to explain by flattening alone — stem nodes elongated as if by brief, intense heat, iron-rich "magnetite" spherules in the soil, and altered seed growth. Levengood published the claim in Physiologia Plantarum in 1994, [7] Haselhoff set it out for a general reader in The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles (2001) [8] and extended it in the same journal that year. [9] The corpus reports this work but does not lean on it: most of the program's output sits outside peer review, and its methods — how formations are selected, how samples are controlled — are seriously contested. It raises questions it has not answered; it has not shown that any formation is beyond human making.[d]

Beyond the anomaly research lies the alternative-ufological reading, which treats certain formations as deliberate messages. Its two set pieces both appeared next to the Chilbolton radio telescope and at Crabwood, in Hampshire. The Chilbolton "Arecibo response" (August 2001) reproduced, with changes, the binary message Frank Drake had beamed from Arecibo toward the star cluster M13 in 1974 — the altered version adding silicon to the listed elements and marking three inhabited planets rather than one. The Crabwood "alien face" (August 2002) paired a portrait with a disc encoding an ASCII text, decoded by Paul Vigay as a warning: "Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES... There is GOOD out there. We Oppose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING." [10] These are striking objects, and no circle-making group has claimed them; but neither has been verified as non-human by any method mainstream science accepts, and both belong to the same tradition of unattributed formations that skilled makers have shown themselves able to produce. [11] [e]

The Wheel of Heaven framework parts company here with the popular "crop circles are alien signals" claim, and does so deliberately. On the canon, real contact is not cryptic. The Elohim are an advanced human civilization whose model of contact is open, mutual recognition — the Embassy of Message from the Designers — and whose disclosure was long the argument of the exiled Lucifer faction, the Serpent, who held that humanity should be told its origins plainly. It is worth being exact about the canon here, because popular tradition collapses the distinction: the disclosure faction is Lucifer's, and it should not be confused with the abolitionist faction under Satan, which argued not for secrecy but for ending the human project altogether. A civilization intent on being recognized would not leave its identity to be read out of flattened barley by hobbyists.

The canon's one direct engagement with the subject is correspondingly modest. The foreword to Message from the Designers records that "not long after we built a small scale model of the embassy... a crop circle appeared in England which bore an astonishing resemblance to it," [12] and the book's acknowledgments thank Colin Andrews for a 1990 aerial photograph taken at Cheesefoot Head. The corpus treats that single resemblance as meaningful within its own frame without generalizing from it. Alliance communication, on this reading, runs through the contact narrative — the 13 December 1973 encounter at Puy-de-Lassolas and the 7 October 1975 transport to the home world — and through prophetic transmission, not through formations in fields. Raëlian interest in crop circles since the 1990s is cultural interest, not doctrine.[f] This whole reading is offered as interpretation, and labelled as such.

The mainstream and skeptical view

The mainstream account is straightforward and carries most of the weight of the evidence. Crop circles are made by people. The construction methods are documented, taught, and demonstrated on camera; the concentration in Wiltshire tracks the concentration of circle-makers rather than anything in the ground; and the steady rise in size and complexity follows the improving skill of a known community of artists. Where the phenomenon was once "unexplained," it is now, in the mainstream view, explained — a living folk-art with a thirty-year documented history. Investigators such as Joe Nickell have argued the skeptical case in detail, pressing the anomaly research on its sampling and controls and finding no formation that requires a non-human maker. [13] [14]

Two once-serious alternatives have fallen away. Terence Meaden's plasma-vortex hypothesis — that spinning columns of ionized air could flatten crops into rings — was published in peer-reviewed meteorology and taken seriously in the 1980s, [15] but it could not survive the formations' growing geometric complexity or the Bower-Chorley confession, and Meaden himself came to accept that most are human-made.[b] The recurring appeal to a 1678 pamphlet, "The Mowing-Devil," as a pre-modern crop circle is weaker still: the pamphlet describes a devil mowing — cutting — a field overnight, not flattening it, and belongs to a 17th-century broadsheet tradition of moral-allegorical prodigy tales rather than to any record of real circles. [16] [17] [c] The 1966 Tully "saucer nests" in Queensland, sometimes cited as an antecedent, are a UFO-landing ground-trace case — a separate category treated under Ufology — rather than a crop formation.

The honest position, and the corpus's, is the one the record supports: crop circles are overwhelmingly human-made land art; a small residue of physical claims remains genuinely unresolved but unproven; the "messages" are unverified; and the canon's engagement is limited to one resonant case, held lightly.

See also

Notes

  1. a. The 1991 Bower-Chorley confession is load-bearing for the corpus's position. Before it, the 1980s literature — Delgado and Andrews's Circular Evidence, the cerealogist community, Meaden's plasma-vortex work — treated the decade's rising tally of formations as unexplained. After it, the mainstream view shifted to documented human-made art. Bower and Chorley built a formation for journalists in about 45 minutes, and a crop-circle researcher who examined it, unaware of its origin, pronounced it genuine — a direct demonstration that human construction could match the scale and complexity of the 1980s formations. The organized circle-making that followed (Circlemakers; the earlier Team Satan; the wider international scene) extended the point.
  2. b. Terence Meaden's plasma-vortex hypothesis appeared in peer-reviewed meteorological literature and was taken seriously through the 1980s. It was abandoned in the 1990s for two reasons: formations grew far too complex — sharp-edged, intricate, pictographic — for any atmospheric vortex to produce, and the Bower-Chorley confession together with the documented circle-making accounted for the cases it had explained. Meaden later granted that most contemporary formations are human-made while keeping an interest in a few early ones. A peer-reviewed hypothesis tested against new evidence and dropped by its own author is ordinary scientific practice, not a scandal.
  3. c. The 1678 Mowing Devil pamphlet is a weak precedent. It describes mowing — cutting standing crop cleanly — rather than the flattening that defines the modern phenomenon, and it belongs to the 17th-century English broadsheet tradition of supernatural-prodigy literature (documented in Walsham's Providence in Early Modern England and Friedman's Miracles and the Pulp Press), which framed such tales as moral allegory rather than reportage. Folklorists such as Bob Trubshaw and Jeremy Harte read it within those conventions; crop-circle writers have read it as evidence of pre-modern circles. It is a genuinely interesting document from a different category.
  4. d. The residual-anomaly program (the BLT Research Team; Eltjo Haselhoff) has some peer-reviewed publication — Levengood 1994 and Haselhoff 2001, both in Physiologia Plantarum — but most of its output sits outside peer review. Joe Nickell and other critics have raised concerns about selection bias in which formations are sampled, soil-sampling method, statistical controls, and telling genuine anomalies from sampling artifacts. The corpus reports the work descriptively while flagging its contested status; it has not established the strong claim that crop circles cannot be human-made.
  5. e. The Chilbolton 'Arecibo response' (August 2001) and the Crabwood 'alien face' (August 2002) are the leading cases offered for non-human communication content. Neither has been claimed by a circle-making group, and both carry elaborate alleged messages — the Chilbolton bitmap reworking the 1974 Arecibo transmission, the Crabwood disc an ASCII warning. Neither has been verified as non-human by any method mainstream science accepts. The corpus registers their interest without treating their content as established contact.
  6. f. The Vorilhon source engages crop circles through a single case — the Message from the Designers foreword's note that a formation appeared in England resembling the small-scale embassy model the Raëlian architects had built. The corpus does not extend this to the strong 'crop circles are alliance messages' claim. On its reading the alliance communicates through the Vorilhon contact narrative (13 December 1973 at Puy-de-Lassolas; 7 October 1975, the transport to the home world) and through prophetic transmission, not through marks in fields. Raëlian interest in crop circles since the 1990s — including the acknowledged 1990 Cheesefoot Head photograph — is cultural interest and selective engagement, not doctrine.

References

  1. [1] The Book Which Tells The Truth by Raël (1973) Foreword

    Foundational Raëlian source — the *Message from the Designers* foreword's note of a crop circle resembling the small-scale Raëlian embassy model.

  2. [2] Circular Evidence: A Detailed Investigation of the Flattened Swirled Crops Phenomenon by Pat Delgado, Colin Andrews (1989)

    Delgado and Andrews's 1989 treatment of the British phenomenon — the principal book-length study before the Bower-Chorley confession.

  3. [3] Crop Circles: Signs of Contact by Colin Andrews, Stephen J. Spignesi (2003)

    Andrews and Spignesi's 2003 statement of the alternative-ufological reading after the confession.

  4. [4] Crop Circles: The Greatest Mystery of Modern Times by Lucy Pringle (1999)

    Pringle's 1990s synthesis, from the founder of the Pringle Crop Circle Archive.

  5. [5] The Field Guide: The Art, History and Philosophy of Crop Circle Making by Rob Irving, John Lundberg (2006)

    Irving and Lundberg's account of organized circle-making from inside the Circlemakers collective.

  6. [6] Round in Circles: Physicists, Poltergeists, Pranksters, and the Secret History of the Cropwatchers by Jim Schnabel (1993)

    Schnabel's journalistic history of the field across the 1991 Bower-Chorley confession.

  7. [7] The Circles Effect and Its Mysteries by Terence Meaden (1989)

    Meaden's statement of the plasma-vortex hypothesis — later abandoned, but published within a peer-reviewed scientific frame.

  8. [8] Anatomical Anomalies in Crop Formation Plants by William C. Levengood (1994)

    Levengood's peer-reviewed publication of the BLT Research Team's residual-anomaly work.

  9. [9] The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles: Scientific Research and Urban Legends by Eltjo H. Haselhoff (2001)

    Haselhoff's accessible account of the residual-anomaly research.

  10. [10] Opinions and Comments on Levengood WC, Talbott NP (1999) Dispersion of Energies in Worldwide Crop Formations by Eltjo H. Haselhoff (2001)

    Haselhoff's peer-reviewed extension of the Levengood node-bending analysis.

  11. [11] Glimpses of Other Realities by Linda Moulton Howe (1993)

    Howe's engagement with alternative ufology, including crop-circle case material.

  12. [12] Levengood’s Crop-Circle Plant Research by Joe Nickell (1996)

    Nickell's published skeptical critique of the Levengood anomaly research.

  13. [13] Real-Life X-Files: Investigating the Paranormal by Joe Nickell (2001)

    Nickell's account of systematic skeptical investigation applied to crop circles and other paranormal claims.

  14. [14] Providence in Early Modern England by Alexandra Walsham (1999)

    Walsham's study of the 17th-century English broadsheet tradition behind the 1678 Mowing Devil pamphlet.

  15. [15] Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution by Jerome Friedman (1993)

    Friedman's study of the mid-17th-century English pulp press and its miraculous content.

  16. [16] Prehistoric Avebury by Aubrey Burl (1979)

    Burl's study of the Avebury henge complex and the Wiltshire prehistoric landscape.

  17. [17] Avebury: The Biography of a Landscape by Joshua Pollard, Andrew Reynolds (2002)

    Pollard and Reynolds's scholarly synthesis of the Avebury landscape archaeology.

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APA
Crop Circles. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/crop-circles/
MLA
"Crop Circles." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/crop-circles/.
Chicago
"Crop Circles." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/crop-circles/.
BibTeX
@misc{woh-crop-circles,
  author       = {{Wheel of Heaven}},
  title        = {Crop Circles},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/crop-circles/}},
  note         = {CC0-1.0 public domain}
}
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